Literary Hell
by DB Sommer
Summary: An OVA fic. A look into Yomiko's mind and some literature she's come across.


Literary Hell A Read or Die! OVA shortfic  
  
Any and all CC is appreciated. You can contact me at   
  
All of my fics are stored at the following:  
  
Larry F's new address  
  
And also Angcobra is now storing fics, at http:go.to/AngCobra  
  
At  
  
Or RC books  
  
Standard Disclaimer: I don't own any of the Read or Die characters.  
  
[Writer's notes: This takes place some time after the events in the OVA series. It's an idea that came to be about one of the characters and their possible take on something. This one is completely serious, for a change, as well. It's a simple, straightforward thing, and it's not like there's a whole lot of ROD fics out there. Enjoy.]  
  
Xxxxxxxxxxxxx  
  
"You know, it's the constant calls like this from Mr. Joker that keep me from applying for more than substitute teaching jobs."  
  
"Don't be like that, Yomiko," Wendy pleaded in what she hoped was a reassuring voice. "He wouldn't call you unless it was a job that only you can do. And the organization pays you more than enough to support yourself since we keep mucking up your opportunities for more regular employment." Joker's personal secretary watched Yomiko nearly lose her balance as her ever present dolly and suitcase nearly fell over after one of the wheels caught in a large crack in the sidewalk. "Why did you bring that anyway? This job is only ten blocks away from the hotel you're staying at."  
  
"There's a new rare bookshop that opened nearby. If things go well, I might get a chance to look over their selection when I'm through with the mission. I wonder what this is all about. Mr. Joker was awful close-mouthed about it." Yomiko's eyes suddenly focused on Wendy, as though it was the first time she realized she was there. "And why did he tell you to come along with me? You haven't suddenly developed any powers you haven't told me about, have you?"  
  
"None that I'm aware of. Mr. Joker instructed me to follow you and assist you in any way I can. I hope it's for something of vital importance that they could only trust me to do." Wendy blushed at the idea of saving the world the way Yomiko had on several occasions.  
  
The answer seemed to satisfy Yomiko. The two continued their way through the rest of the windy London streets until they arrived at their destination.  
  
"At least I'll feel at home." Yomiko smiled in delight at what was easily her favorite government establishment: the public library. This particular one was an aged stone structure, centuries old, that was a treat for her eyes. She felt pride, knowing that it had survived everything from the elements to war, sheltering books in its monolithic embrace. She basked in its presence and breathed in deeply. "Can't you smell the books from here?"  
  
Wendy took a deep breath and nearly gagged. The was a taxi stand nearby, giving the area the heady aroma associated with burning fossil fuels, grease, and other motor related paraphernalia. "Perhaps we should go inside?"  
  
"Absolutely." Yomiko was in much better spirits as she led the way to the building. A skip entered her step, despite the fact she was lugging around a small suitcase full of various papers and reading material.  
  
They entered the library and could immediately tell something was amiss. The entrance had been cordoned off and a number of men, all in the organization's employ, stood guard. Wendy recognized some of them as low level field agents used mostly for simple muscle jobs and other grunt work. None of the men seemed particularly tense, and a number were laughing aloud. While all of them turned to see the newcomers, no one went down to confront them. The only concession the guards made to the girls' intrusion was to spare them an occasional glance while continuing what they had been doing before.  
  
As Yomiko and Wendy stopped to assess the situation, a man that had been waiting nearby approached. At a glance, he stood out from the others. He was tall, well over six feet in height, but very slender, though not to the point of gauntness. He appeared to be in his early to mid-thirties, with a narrow face and pointy nose reminiscent of a hunting bird. His gray trenchcoat and matching wide-brimmed hat complimented the dour mood he was projecting.  
  
As he walked toward them, Wendy noted he had a rather thick cane in his hand, one he didn't really need for walking, since he strolled toward them quickly and fluidly, the cane barely brushing a tile every fourth step or so.  
  
"Agent Paper. Miss Earhart, I am the field agent in charge of this case. You may call me Headmaster Sykes." He bowed before the girls, though the gesture was more perfunctory than flourishing.  
  
Yomiko's eyes became enchanted again. "Oh, you're a headmaster? I'm a school teacher. Well, more like part-time school teacher. I've never actually met a headmaster before. What academy do you teach at?"  
  
Sykes shot her a tired look. "I don't work at a school. I'm a full time agent for the Royal British Library's Division of Special Operations."  
  
"You really don't have to say the whole name." Personally, Wendy hated it since she had to type it out all the time on interoffice memos and other written material.  
  
Yomiko was confused. "I thought you said you were a headmaster."  
  
"That's my codename. I'm no more a headmaster than you are a sheet of paper. What sort of twit would give their real name out in the field anyway?" he said mostly to himself.  
  
Yomiko laughed nervously. "Why do they call you headmaster then?"  
  
In answer, Sykes brought up the item that had been in his hand, which Wendy realized was not a cane, but rather a long thick piece of rounded metal. Sykes held it by the middle with both hands close together, then twisted it around, as though it had been screwed together. The action caused the bottom of the shaft to extend a third again its length. Despite the fact it had telescoped, the end was still just as thick as the top part it had come from. It was almost as if the metal had grown instead of sliding out.  
  
Sykes gave it another twist, and two crescent shaped pieces of metal sprang out on opposite sides near the top, locking into place. The item was revealed to be not a cane, but instead a large battle axe. The metal gleamed with an unearthly silver sheen, and looked sharp enough to cleave anything. Seeing the wicked-looking weapon only centimeters away from her face made Wendy gulp audibly.  
  
Yomiko appeared impressed. "But that still doesn't explain why they call you headmaster."  
  
"It wasn't my idea. The boys in the organization made it up as my codename for when I'm in the field. It's sort of a joke based on my weapon and what I like to collect with it."  
  
"Collect with...?" Realization suddenly dawned in Yomiko's eyes.  
  
Sykes looked the much smaller girl over, staring at her with obvious interest. "Has anyone told you you have a lovely shape to your head?"  
  
"No, and I'd rather they didn't." Yomiko nervously fingered some of the blank notecards she kept in the breast pocket of her coat.  
  
Sykes retracted the blade and returned to its cane sized status. "In any event, you've been summoned since your unique abilities are perfectly suited to this assignment. I was in the middle of a mission which involved following a double agent in MI-6, who was secretly working for the Chinese. Since the government was uncertain how compromised MI-6's security was, they called us in. After discovering the agent had purloined some top secret information on the newest generation of submarines the government is planning on manufacturing, we decided to trail him and see if we could identify his contact before reeling him in. We discovered he had converted the information to microdot form, embedded it in a book, and that the drop point for it was this library. I was hot on the double agent's trail when he spotted me, and he ducked in here. I tailed him closely, but he was out of my line of sight briefly. He tried running for it, while making it clear he wouldn't be taken alive in the process. He wasn't. Now we have something of a problem, and that's where you come in."  
  
Yomiko's eyes widened in unrestrained delight and a blush brightened her cheeks. "You mean-"  
  
"--You're going to be paid to read a bunch of books," Sykes finished dryly.  
  
Joyous laughter filled the air as Yomiko twirled around, dancing to a playful melody only she could hear. "It's like a dream come true."  
  
"Why don't we go and I can show you around?" Sykes offered. Both girls were quick to follow him, Yomiko still flitting about in pleasure while Wendy remained ambivalent for the most part, though she was pleased to see her friend so delighted.  
  
Sykes led them to a wing of the library. "The good news, or I suppose you would view it as bad news, is that this was the only place that I lost track of him. He entered this section with the book and emerged without it. This section of the library dead ends, and there's nowhere else he could have put it. Congratulations, Miss Readman. You only have to read every book in the fiction section from A to C."  
  
Still giddy with joy, Yomiko ran to the shelves, the wheels on her dolly squeaking loudly as she pulled it along as best as she could.  
  
Wendy turned to Sykes. "Why was I ordered to come along?"  
  
"You're her gopher. Do whatever she wants. Grab books. Hold the pages for her. Get her tea. Back massage, that sort of thing."  
  
"Just more paperwork then." Wendy sighed. And she had gotten her hopes up that Mr. Joker had finally started to take her seriously. Despondent, she did not even bother with a farewell for Sykes as he headed out of the library, as dour as ever despite his part of the mission being complete. She tried looking on the bright side, at least she was out of the office, even if she was only exchanging her stuffy desk and lack of windows for a musty library and endless rows of periodicals.  
  
Forcing herself somewhat out of her melancholia, Wendy rejoined Yomiko, who was standing in the middle of an aisle, her head swaying back and forth like a cobra mesmerized by a snake charmer's flute.  
  
"What would you like me to do?" Wendy asked.  
  
That snapped Yomiko out of her dreamworld. "Yes, well, we'll start off by looking for any books that are out of order. The double agent was probably in a hurry to ditch the book, and might not have been careful about where he put it. Since the library was cordoned off right afterwards, the librarians wouldn't have had a chance to tidy things up. After we get all of those, we'll pull all of the newer ones. I have a feeling he'd rather embed the microdot in the text of something new rather than an older book where it might stand out more. And if it's not in any of those, we'll just have to look through all the rest." She clasped her hands together and sighed.  
  
Wendy kept from pouting. This was one of the most boring things she could possibly think of. Hopefully, with her power over paper, Yomiko could just skim over the pages and spot the microdot visually. The secretary shuddered to think of how long it would take if Yomiko actually read every one of the books.  
  
The books were alphabetized by author, making it easy to spot ones out of place. Wendy found a half dozen immediately. She grabbed one of the carts librarians used and began gathering them in a pile. The work went quietly, which was, she supposed, appropriate for a library. But since there were no other patrons, it didn't matter how much noise she made. Disliking the silence, Wendy tried starting a conversation while pulling books. "Have you read any of these?"  
  
Unlike Wendy, Yomiko didn't pull any of the books from the shelves. She simply looked them over as she walked past. "I've read all of them, except the very newest ones, but I'll be able to take care of that once I cash the check for this job. I can't believe they're paying me to read all of this."  
  
Wendy supposed it had been a silly question, knowing Yomiko and her tastes. "Is there anything you don't like to read? Pornography magazines, perhaps?" She snickered at the joke.  
  
"Sometimes they have interesting articles," Yomiko answered soberly. "I actually don't care for technical journals. Mathematics books tend to be boring, and I'm a bit old now for children's books, like anything by Dr. Seuss and the like." She began walking down the aisle, leaving a finger to play along the spines of the books as she passed them by. "Fiction is my favorite by far, though. I can't get enough of those. I could read them all day, if given a chance. I suppose I'll have one, this time. Do you think they'll deliver supper here?"  
  
"I'll find out." It was her job, after all, Wendy thought with just a hint of bitterness. "I suppose you've never met a book you didn't like." She paraphrased the saying from someone whose name Wendy couldn't recall.  
  
Yomiko stopped instantly, her finger resting on a book. The position she had stopped in allowed the florescent lighting to gleam off her lenses, making them take on an unearthly glow of their own. Yomiko's head cocked slightly, as though she were listening to something in the distance. Her smile disappeared, replaced by lips that formed only a straight line. The unusual set to Yomiko's features was unsettling in a way that Wendy had never felt before, at least in connection with her friend.  
  
"Oh no, there was one book I didn't like. I didn't like it at all." Yomiko's voice took on a far-off note, as though she was speaking to herself, and Wendy just happened to be in the direction that the paper user's face was pointed toward.  
  
With the one hand that had been resting on the shelf, Yomiko pulled a book off. It was a hardcover, probably no more than two hundred pages. She held it out flat, one palm underneath and one on top so it was sandwiched between them.  
  
"It was an awful book, I knew it from the instant I read the first six words in the opening sentence. My gut twisted up in knots, something that had never happened before. I should have closed it then, but I had never done such a thing before. In the past, I only stopped reading if I was interrupted by something important, like becoming weak with hunger, something was on fire, or I fell asleep, but there was always some compelling reason. So I kept on reading, and it only got worse with each passing sentence. I wanted to tear my eyes away, but I couldn't. It was like watching someone bleeding to death from a terrible wound that you can do nothing about. You don't want to, but at the same time you can't help but watch as the blood flows out of them and pools on the ground."  
  
Wendy wanted to say something, but couldn't. There was something dangerous and disturbing lurking beneath Yomiko's eyes. At the moment, it was fixated on some event in the distant past. To say anything now would risk focusing its attention upon her, and the very concept terrified the secretary to the core of her being.  
  
Yomiko continued. "Each word was like a poison, and I couldn't help but keep drinking it. And as each sentence passed before my eyes, my soul felt fouled, and I thought I would retch up everything I had eaten. If only it was so easy. But no, I couldn't get rid of it so easily. Instead I had to live with the images it seared in my mind for the rest of my life. And no amount of reading anything else could kill it. No, it's like cancer. It never really goes away. It just goes into remission, but it's always there, lurking beneath the surface, and so is this thing I wish I had never seen. No matter what I do, it'll be with me until the day I die.  
  
"Hell isn't something from out of Dante's Inferno. It isn't impossible landscapes populated by non-existent demons who endlessly torture evil people that perpetrated bad things. Hell is something that is conceived in the human mind and midwifed into reality by their hands, and it forces everyone, both the good and evil, to live in its embrace with no possible alternative or hope for the future. It's something that can exist in the real world, and not only in some fantasy land, and it's that believability that makes it so terrifying. That book showed me what Hell could be."  
  
Yomiko's hands quivered slightly, as though she was trying to squeeze the book flat. Her face contorted, and her brow twitched as though she was having problems thinking.  
  
"That book might be the only thing I truly hate in this world, because it made something I loved with all my heart, something that up to that point in my life had been the one place I could go to for protection from the world, irrevocably flawed. Even now, when I pick up a book, there's always a tiny bit of dread that it might turn out like that one. I don't let the fear stop me, but it's always there, even if only for a fleeting second, and it's enough to sour, at least a little, the delight I could have experienced. It's times like those I wish I could erase the words as if they had never been written. To unmake them, and restore the wonderful, pure innocence I once knew."  
  
It was then Wendy noticed a peculiar thing. Something had begun to form on the downside corner of the book. It took her a moment to realize it was a drop. Her gaze turned upward in an effort to locate the source of the liquid, but she saw nothing. Nor did she see anything on the cover that indicated the water had started there and trickled downward. It was like something wet had been in the book to begin with.  
  
The drop grew larger, a tiny blob hanging impossibly on the corner. As it enlarged, Wendy realized it was not water at all, but a liquid colored the deepest shade of midnight black.  
  
Then the drop grew too large and it fell to the tile on the library floor. It struck like any other large drop would, splattering as it impacted with the hard surface. It left jet black residue behind. It was then Wendy realized what the liquid was.  
  
It was ink.  
  
More drops, far too many to count, joined it, coming down in a miniature black rain. Yomiko's trembling grew in power and her face contorted in what was obviously some sort of supreme effort on her part. Sweat beaded her brow, yet she did not try to wipe it clean. Instead her hands remained where they were on the book as the ink collected at her feet, splashing slightly and marring her shoes and stockings with tiny flecks of black.  
  
And then the splashing stopped. No further drops fell. Not even a bit of residue clung to the surface of the tome. The pool of black was small, but contrasted sharply with the white tile of the library floor.  
  
A bit of the distance seemed to leave Yomiko's eyes. She said, "I don't feel like reading today. We'll get an early start tomorrow and find the microdot." Yomiko placed the book back on the shelf, turned, and walked away in silence.  
  
Wendy stood there, motionless, trying to figure out exactly what had occurred, and uncertain she wanted to know. She decided it would probably be best to leave well enough alone and pretend nothing ever happened, while making a mental note not to discuss books with Yomiko ever again.  
  
Since the agent in charge had left, Wendy saw no reason to remain in the library. As she walked toward the end of the aisle, mindful to not get any ink on her, she noticed the book Yomiko had been holding was sticking out more than the others around it. A sort of morbid curiosity beckoned, and she was unable to help herself as she pulled the book down and flipped through the pages. Each one was as white as pristine snow.  
  
She closed the book and read the title on the cover, which had been embossed in gold lettering rather than ink and thus remained intact.  
  
It read, 'Fahrenheit 451.'  
  
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  
  
[End Notes] Let me qualify this by saying I don't really think Yomiko would react this way, but if any such thing was to have such an effect on her, could you picture anything worse than that for her? The girl just ain't right in the head when it comes to books. And I admit to taking liberties in her powers, and implying she had the ability to control the paper to the degree that she could force the ink to slide off it, but I thought it worked better that way, especially with the symmetry with the dead body she mentions earlier and Wendy's actions at the end matching Yomiko's comparison. Consider it literary license.  
As to Headmaster Sykes being so detailed, this was a test run for his character. I'll be using him in a future ROD fanfic, and I sort of wanted to see if he'd work out in this environment, as well as reinforcing the idea that Yomiko isn't the only exceptional agent the organization has.]  
  
DB Sommer 


End file.
